Remembering Route 66 -- Repeating our 1962 adventure

 

In June of 1962, my Penn State University roommate, Tom Bryan, and I drove his 1961Chevy all the way from our hometown in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to southern California. He was entering the US Air Force and needed to report to George Air Force Base in Victorville, CA later that summer.

            I was just along for the adventure. As you probably know, very little of the interstate highway system had been completed at that time, so we drove mostly on two-lane roads. We decided to follow Route 66 for as much of the trip as possible. We had picked it up in Springfield, Missouri and followed it all the way to California. Tom and I have stayed in touch over the years and so, in August of 2008, we decided to ride, this time on the motorcycles we both now enjoy, over as much of old Route 66 as we could find, just to see what it would be like after more than 45 years.

            Tom now lives in Austin, Texas, so he rode north on his new Kawasaki Concours to meet me. I rode south on my 2005 R1200RT and we met up at a run-down relic of a motel on Route 66 just west of Oklahoma City. We had intended to stay there, just as we had in 1962, but the years had not been kind to the Carlyle Motel. Instead, we decided to ride on west in search of better accommodations.

            We rode through Bethany and Yukon just outside Oklahoma City, where we stopped for a burger at Sid's Diner, just as we had on the earlier trip. A few miles down the road in El Reno, Oklahoma, we found an acceptable place and spent our first night reminiscing and planning. As we had learned, there is not much of the old Main Street of America left in some states.

            U.S. Route 66, also known as the Will Rogers Highway, was established on November 11, 1926. It originally ran from Chicago, Illinois through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California before it ended in Los Angeles. In total, it spanned 2,448 miles of history and American culture. U.S. 66 was officially removed from the U.S. Highway System on June 27, 1985 - an unfortunate casualty of the new Interstate Highway System.

            Interstate 40 has siphoned off most of the traffic, so parts of 66 are completely gone and others are difficult to find. There are a couple of good Web sites devoted to the old road and some research on those had given us some good indications of how to find the disconnected stretches of it, as well as some places of interest to stop.

            On my way to meet up with Tom, I had taken Route 66 in Springfield, Missouri again and followed it to Oklahoma City. Just east of Tulsa, Oklahoma, I began to recognize a few things we had seen in 1962. One of them was a place near a town called Catoosa where there was a short four-lane stretch of 66, where there were actually two separate but parallel two-lane bridges. I remembered that because it was so unusual in those days. Just beyond those bridges was something I stopped to see that had not been there in 1962. It is a large blue whale next to a swimming pool. It was built in the 1970s and is still a tourist stop.

 

Our first stop after El Reno was in Clinton, Oklahoma, at the Route 66 Museum, where we enjoyed seeing lots of artifacts. Then we got back on the road and rode through small towns called Elk City, Sayre and, as we approached the Texas state line, Texola, Oklahoma. There were still some little pieces of the old road, sometimes running along I-40 like an extended frontage road and we rode on Route 66 whenever we could. Just west of Amarillo, Texas, we stopped at Stanley Marsh's Cadillac Ranch. It had not been there in 1962, but we had heard of it so we wanted to see it. It consists of several Cadillac sedans buried nose-first in the flat Texas prairie. Why? Just because Stanley wanted to, I suppose. Later that day we stopped for lunch at the Mid-point Cafe in Adrian, Texas, just as we had in 1962. It is the midpoint of Route 66, and worth a stop.

            Perhaps our most nostalgic stop came the next day. We rode into Tucumcari, New Mexico and searched out the Blue Swallow Motel where we had stayed on our earlier trip. It was still there and still operating as a motel. Right across the street from it was the TeePee souvenir store that had also been there in 1962. The souvenir store was closed that day, which probably saved us some money. During the 1962 trip, we had left Route 66 and gone a bit north to Santa Fe just to see it, so we decided to do that again. We are glad we did because we happened to get there on an evening when they were having a rock nostalgia music fest on the square in the middle of town. We had a great time singing along to the old songs.

            The next day we rode southwest and resumed the Route 66 ride, going through Grants, New Mexico (where 66 is called Santa Fe Avenue) and on through Gallup, where we stopped at the famous El Rancho Hotel, but ended up staying where we had stayed in 1962; the San Franciscan Lodge. We crossed the Continental Divide just west of Thereau, New Mexico. About five miles west of Thereau, Route 66 dead-ended, so we had to get back on I-40 over into Arizona.

            There is quite a bit of the old road still usable in Arizona so we stayed on it as much as we could, going through Holbrook and Winslow (where we actually got off the bikes and stood on a corner and sang a few lines from the Eagles song, even though they didn't release "Take it Easy" until 1972.) The next significant stop was at the Museum Club, a famous bar in Flagstaff where we again heard some great music.

            The next day, just west of Flagstaff in a sort-of town called Bellemont, we found what is left of the Pine Breeze Motel, which became famous when it was featured in Easy Rider. We hadn't stayed there before, but we wanted to see it anyway. We rode on through Williams and over to Seligman, where we stopped at the Rusty Bolt Souvenir & Gift Shop and had a Coke at Delgadillo's Snow Cap Drive-in. A bit later we stopped again in Kingman and had lunch at Mr. D's Route 66 Diner, where we decided the burgers were just as good as we remembered them. You can convince yourself of anything when you are trying to remember something that happened 45 years ago.

            Our last stop in Arizona was in Oatman, where burros own the right-of-way in the streets and where Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their honeymoon at the Oatman Hotel, which is still there. The next day, we crossed over into California and rode across the Mojave Desert to Barstow. Even though we left early in the morning to avoid the mid-day heat, we were reminded of how hot we were in 1962 because Tom's 1961 Chevy had no air conditioning. By noon, we'd had enough of desert motorcycling and so we stopped at the Route 66 Motel in Barstow.

 

  That evening, looking over the map, we could see that in 1962, we had taken Route 66 (here called the Old Trails Highway) southwest toward Victorville, but neither Tom nor I had ever been to Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks, so we decided to leave 66 and head northwest. The parks were truly beautiful, so it was a good decision and, after stopping for a couple of nights in Fresno while visiting the parks, we headed southwest toward the California coast.

            We arrived there at a town called Morro Bay, where we had some fine seafood and then rode down to San Luis Obispo, where we met up for a small reunion with several other classmates from Penn State.

            After a couple of days of good food, good drinks and lots of college story-swapping, we turned the bikes around and headed east. The ride back across the Mojave was even hotter this time, but the good memories gave us fuel for the ride home.